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How To Save Battery Life On Your iPhone 6 (and any other iPhone)

This entry was posted on March 21, 2016 by Kailey.

So your phone is dying as you try to buy tickets for the midnight premier of the latest superhero smashup spectacular. Typical. Even though battery life in Apple devices has slowly been ticking upward, most iPhones still struggle to last a full day of heavy usage. Sure you can make it with limited use, but if your job is all about being plugged into social media (i.e. the person writing this post) then it gets tricky. You either have to carry a charger at all times and join the ranks of wall huggers in every cafe in the US, or schlep a spare battery pack with you constantly. So if you are looking for ways to conserve and save battery life on your iPhone 6 (or any other iPhone really), here is a list of tips to help.

Turn Off Parallax Fanciness

The iPhone comes with a built-in gyroscope that can do all kinds of nifty motion sensing things. It also has a cool parallax effect on the home screen that lets it move with you. Turn it off. The parallax effect drains the battery because it is constantly accessing your gyroscope as well as rendering the home screen to look like it is moving. It may look cool, but it is a battery sucking luxury you don't need if you are conserving energy. To do this go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion. This will turn off all those fancy battery draining effects, and also possibly help with that vertigo you feel every time you look at your screen.

Don't Bother Quitting Apps (usually...)

Apple recently reiterated its stance that you don't need to quit apps running in the background. In fact, quitting apps and relaunching them frequently can actually drain your batteries as each instance is reloaded into your device's RAM.

That being said... some apps do run constantly in the background and will drain your battery even if they are not activated. So go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh and see which apps are using your battery while in the background. If you don't want them too, then turn it off. If you do want them to, then keep in mind that you should quit them manually if you are trying to save battery.

Limit Apps Using Location Services

This is just good standard practice. You don't need your apps calling the mother ship and telling it where you are at any given time if you don't have to. Go to Settings > Privacy and turn off permissions for any apps you don't want tracking your location constantly. This takes battery since the GPS on your phone will constantly be in use while they are tracking you. Hello instant battery savings.

Airplanes, Wifi, Bluetooth and Brightness: All Reasons to Swipe Up

A while back Apple gave us the control center for iPhones and iPods everywhere. With a simple swipe up, you can access a whole panel of controls for your phone. This panel of controls happens to be one of the best ways to conserve your battery usage.

What? You may say, wondering how using your phone more could possibly help the situation. Perhaps because this control center is the main hub for most of the power-sucking vampires that reside in your iPhone.

Turn On Screen Rotation Lock

Your gyroscope can tell if your phone is sideways, upside down, or falling to its death at any given time. This takes battery life. Turn on the screen rotation lock located in your control center. If you don't need landscape mode constantly, this will save you battery life as well because you won't need your gyroscope as often. Some users have reported 10-20% power savings from this trick alone.

Turn Off Your Bluetooth!

Imagine trying to sprint home and have to stop every ten feet and do ten push-ups. Bluetooth is a little like that in draining energy as quickly as humanly possible. If your Bluetooth is on, your phone is constantly searching for another device to connect too. It’s nice when you are driving and want to listen to Hamilton on repeat. It’s not needed if you are sitting and watching Hamilton YouTube videos, wondering what you have to do to get tickets to the show. Basically, it pulls intense amounts of battery life simply searching for a way to link up. Turn it on only if you need it, whether that is to check in your Fitbit or listen to some jams in the car.

If you are an Apple watch owner, you’ll have to leave your Bluetooth on for functionality of your watch. Try to limit the use and keep a charger on hand, and follow these simple steps.

Stop Using Your iPhone Screen As A Flashlight

No really, stop. That dashboard that handles many of your other bits and pieces of phone tech can also work as a flashlight that can be turned on and off pretty quickly. Your phone screen pales in comparison.

Look for the flashlight image whilst scrambling around trying to turn off your car alarm in the middle of the night after a raccoon tried to break in, simply tap and when you’ve finally achieved peace and quiet again, tap off again. Not too hard right?

On top of this, you can lower the brightness on your phone screen by swiping the sunlight bar left and right. Or follow these simple steps:

Your phone will adjust based on an ambient light sensor and you’ll save a little more juice.

Airplane Mode and Wi-Fi

This last piece involves energy saving through the signals your phone is sending out. Not in need of receiving text messages while watching 10 Cloverfield Lane in the theater? (Seriously, don’t be that person). Or trying to get your kid to do their homework and not text their teenage significant other?

Airplane mode is your new best friend. By tapping this on in your dashboard, you turn off any reception of text messages, Internet services, and your phone becomes a brick still capable of playing Flappy Bird and that’s about it. It’s great for moments when you don’t need to use your phone but it also can save you serious battery juice.

Wifi is another battery saver when you decide that watching the new season of Daredevil on your iPhone really is the best way to watch it. It’s not but that’s ok. However if you have to show someone that hilarious video of a baby laughing at its’ own sneeze, using wifi instead of 4G/LTE will save you data and battery power.

Your phone is looking for ways to connect to the Internet constantly. It doesn’t care that you need that 12% battery to last for four more hours. Link up to the Internet like Wifi and the strain on your battery will be significantly less and you can keep watching your baby videos in peace.

These may be some simple ways to save battery life on your iPhone, but they can make a major impact on your phone’s battery life. You will still need to charge nightly but these simple swipes and taps can give you those few extra hours you need to finally beat that one level of Angry Birds.